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Movie movements that defined cinema: Mumblecore

What is it? Mumblecore is the shy, diffident, Billy-no-mates cousin of the American indie scene. Taking its cue from Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and in particular Claudia Weill’s little seen Girlfriends — the story of a single woman struggling her way through the New York art scene is a key Mumblecore plot staple — Mumblecore is built around an aesthetic of naturalism in storytelling (they are mostly character studies of twentysomething hipsters), performance and production value. Budgets are microscopic — Joe Swanberg made a feature for $3000 — and there is a laissez-faire attitude to audible dialogue. The directors also regularly cast each other in their own work.

The Godfather of Mumblecore is Andrew Bujalski — his first film Funny Ha Ha is cited as the movement’s opening salvo — but characteristically he denies the existence of any movement. It was Bujalski’s sound editor Eric Masunaga who coined the term in a bar at the South By Southwest film festival and Bujalski “made the mistake” of spilling it to a journo. Few movements have coined so many synonyms. Mumblecore is also known as “bedhead cinema” and “slackavetes” (a fusion of Linklater’s Slacker and US indie pioneer John Cassavetes) while the filmmakers are collectively known as “mumblecorps”.